We Are Aztlán!: Chicanx Histories in the Northern Borderlands

By Norma Cárdenas, Oscar Rosales Castañeda, Josué Q. Estrada and 6 more

Mexican Americans/Chicana/os/Chicanx form a majority of the overall Latino population in the United States. In this collection, established and emerging Chicanx researchers diverge from the discipline’s traditional Southwest focus to offer academic and non-academic perspectives specifically on the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest. Their multidisciplinary papers address colonialism, gender, history, immigration, labor, literature, sociology, education, and religion, setting El Movimiento (the Chicanx movement) and the Chicanx experience beyond customary scholarship and illuminating how Chicanxs have challenged racialization, marginalization, and isolation in the northern borderlands.

Contributors to We Are Aztlan! include Norma Cardenas (Eastern Washington University), Oscar Rosales Castaneda (activist, writer), Josue Q. Estrada (University of Washington), Theresa Melendez (Michigan State University, emeritus), the late Carlos Maldonado, Rachel Maldonado (Eastern Washington University, retired), Dylan Miner (Michigan State University), Ernesto Todd Mireles (Prescott College), and Dionicio Valdes (Michigan State University).

Winner of a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Washington State University Press
• Release date: Jul 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781636820705

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

We Are Aztlán!

Jerry García, Editor

…This land was Mexican once, was Indian always.

And will be again.—Gloria Anzaldúa¹

Historians, sociologists, demographers, and scholars in other fields are taking greater notice of the rapidly increasing presence of Chicanxs² throughout the United States. Chicanxs form a majority of the overall Latinx population, which has become the largest underrepresented group in the nation. Indeed, there are significant Chicanx communities in all fifty states. This book has assembled scholars to address specifically the historical and current conditions of Chicanxs beyond the well-studied U.S. Southwest. Ten Chicanx scholars present some of their latest research, offering academic and non-academic perspectives on the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest.³ The papers have a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary focus, addressing colonialism, gender, history, immigration, labor, literature, sociology, education, and religion.

This volume builds on the historiography of the Chicanx presence in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest by examining various forms of resistance, community mobilization, culture, and how people negotiated their precarious position in regions that lacked a critical mass of Chicanxs. Here El Movimiento (the Chicanx movement) and the Chicanx experience are set beyond the boundaries of the Southwest, offering readers insight into distinct strategies developed in mobilizing communities in the northern borderlands. In this manner we gain a better understanding of the contested terrain of race, race relations, political mobilization, and community. More important, this volume illuminates how Chicanxs overcame racialization, marginalization, and isolation by using their sense of identity and the search for social justice.

Another aim is to situate the Chicanx experience in the Pacific Northwest and the Midwest within the national narrative and El Movimiento. The articles provide critical scholarship from an academic perspective, but also discuss the personal lived experience far removed from the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. The presence and history of Chicanxs in the Northwest and Midwest have commonalities with the Southwest and California, especially regarding their treatment and marginalization. However, because the field of Chicanx studies has established a monolithic approach to its master narrative—that the Chicanx experience is predicated on the Southwest experience—the important contributions made by regions outside of that zone are marginalized or not seen as central to the experience or the Chicanx movement. We argue that there are a multiplicity of lived experiences and identities within the field of Chicanx studies and the community. Thus, a goal of this book is to insert and weave together the regional histories of the Northwest and Midwest into the national Chicanx experience.

We Are Aztlán! Chicanx Histories in the Northern Borderlands remains a study of borderlands history and its experience, but shifts geographically to the northern borderlands, an area not only neglected by the field of Chicanx studies, but by borderlands history as well. More specifically, We Are Aztlán! examines Chicanxs along the U.S.-Canada border in the states of Oregon, Washington, and Michigan. Chicanx studies scholars in the Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes⁴ region have advocated for a broader approach to the field and the collection of essays in this volume represent that continued effort. Once it is understood that scholarship on the Mexican experience in the Midwest and the Pacific Northwest has been continuous for over one hundred years, any notion that these regions are new to the field dissipates.

These articles also challenge the accepted narrative of the origins of El Movimiento, which embodied not only patriarchal practices, but also a nationalist ideology, that confined the overall movement to a narrow geographical space.⁵ Michael Soldatenko, in his study on the genesis of the field of Chicanx studies, argues that the standard narrative begins with a creation myth, which homogenized the Chicanx student movement and El Movimiento. Soldatenko suggests that the field move away from this homogenization by placing greater emphasis and importance on the multiplicity and particularity among student protests. Although Soldatenko primarily used California universities and colleges as examples of student protests, We Are Aztlán extends the movement to the Pacific Northwest and Midwest, in particular Seattle and Yakima, Washington, Mt. Angel and Woodburn, Oregon, and [Azt]lansing (East Lansing), Michigan.⁶

Rodolfo F. Acuña, in The Making of Chicano Studies: In the Trenches of Academe, provides a brief examination of the Chicanx student movement at the University of Washington and Washington State University and by doing so expands, albeit in limited fashion, the national narrative of the Chicanx movement beyond California and Texas.⁷ When we include regions outside California and the southern borderlands it becomes apparent the Chicanx Movement, and in this specific case, the student movement, resonated nationally. Thus, Michigan, Washington, Minnesota, Oregon, Idaho, and other areas of the United States embody the essence of El Movimiento and Aztlán. The collection of articles in this book is one attempt to nudge the field into a broader trajectory and understanding of the overall Chicanx experience, but also to remind the field that the presence of Mexicans in these regions is not new.

WE ARE AZTLÁN!

Aztlán, the legendary and mythical homeland of the Mexica, who founded the Aztec Empire, became perhaps the strongest unifying symbol of the Chicanx movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. For Chicanxs, dispossessed and marginalized since their incorporation into the United States, Aztlán symbolized a homeland, a connection to a land long indigenous, but stolen by conquest and later usurped by the encroachment of the expansionist empire of the United States. According to Luis Leal, Aztlán emerged as a symbol in the 1960s with two distinguishing characteristics: one, a geographic region that encompassed the conquered territories of Northern Mexico after the 1848 Mexican-American War, which gave Chicanxs a sense of belonging—a homeland; two, and more important to this collection, Aztlán signaled the spiritual union of Chicanxs within the heart, no matter where they may live or where they find themselves.⁸ In this respect, the saga of Aztlán functions to provide identity, location, and meaning for a people who were previously directionless in their collective existential pilgrimage through earth, wrote Michael Pina, or as art historian Dylan Miner articulates, Aztlán…became the metaphor used to refer to the collective ‘national’ identity and consciousness of Chicanxs. ⁹

As the Chicanx experience moved beyond the 1970s, the meaning of Aztlán has taken twists, turns, and criticisms. Aztlán is no longer confined to a rigid unmovable location; rather, this symbol of unity has transformed into the metaphorical and shifted with the movement of people who carry within them the liberatory essence of Aztlán. For example, the 2004 publication by Chon A. Noriega and Wendy Belcher, I AM AZTLÁN: The Personal Essay in Chicano Studies, quotes Rudolfo A. Anaya’s novel Heart of Aztlán (1976), specifically the protagonists’ search for the Chicanx homeland and the realization that its location is not in the past or defined by space; instead he discovers that Aztlán exists spiritually within him:

Time stood still, and in that enduring moment he felt the rhythm of the heart of Aztlán beat to the measure of his own heart. Dreams and visions became reality, and reality was but the thin substance of myth and legend. A joyful power coursed from the dark womb-heart of the earth into his soul and he cried out I AM AZTLÁN! ¹⁰

With this proclamation, I AM AZTLÁN jettisoned the monolithic approach to the concept of a homeland for Chicanxs and instead positions it within the lived experience of those yearning for liberation in its many manifestations. As the editors articulated, We focus on the process of self-naming—the ubiquitous ‘I am…’—because it is found not just in early Chicano literary, performing, and visual arts, but in Chicano scholarship as well.¹¹ Further, the editors argued that incorporating the personal challenged conventional scholarship from non-Chicanx scholars, who rarely used the I or the personal. Several contributors to our collection position their research from this perspective. Along with rigorous inquiry, intertwined throughout the articles is the personal experience of individuals, which conveys a level of intimacy often missing from scholarly studies.¹²

Because the Pacific Northwest and Midwest are significant regions of the United States, what follows is demographic information in order to provide the reader with a brief historical overview of the growth of the Mexican population in those areas over the past one hundred years. We also provide information on the scholarship produced on Mexican communities in the Northwest and Midwest during the same period.

A BRIEF DEMOGRAPHIC AND HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

Consisting of twelve states, the region known as the Midwest is a massive geographical zone with a population of nearly 68 million (see note 3 for list of states). Based on U.S. Census data the total Hispanic population in this region is approximately 5 million, with people of Mexican origin representing 3.5 million of that total.¹³ In this volume Michigan is examined as part of the Great Lakes region. The state of Michigan has a population of 9.9 million people, with Hispanics numbering 476,283 or 4.8 percent of the total population. The most populated state in the Midwest is Illinois, which currently has a population of 12.8 million people with over 2 million individuals of Hispanic origin or 16.7 percent of the state’s total population.¹⁴

Although Oregon and Washington are the primary Pacific Northwest states examined in the anthology, as a comparison we include demographics on Idaho. These three states have a total population of 12.6 million people with an overall Hispanic population of more than 1.5 million individuals.¹⁵ Broken down individually, Oregon has a total population of 4 million people with Hispanics numbering approximately 500,000 or 12.5 percent of the total population of the state. Washington State has a total population of 7.1 million individuals with people of Hispanic ancestry numbering 874,782 or 12.2 percent of the total state population. The state of Idaho consists of 1.6 million individuals with Hispanics numbering 198,860 people or 12 percent of the total population. Hispanics in the three Pacific Northwest states make up a significant portion of each state’s overall population. As in the Midwest, the origins of this population are deep-rooted.

The Mexican presence in the Pacific Northwest can be traced to the late eighteenth century with the arrival of Spanish explorers to the region, and later during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Mexican mule packers hired by companies and early settlers of the Northwest. However, scholarship on these historical moments did not emerge until the twentieth century, including Chicanx research that provided insight to the significant contributions of Mexicans. In the Pacific Northwest, early twentieth-century Mexican communities remained largely invisible because of the small and transient nature of the population. Scholarship on Mexican communities in the Pacific Northwest during this period is also limited because there simply were no studies conducted on Mexicans in this region similar to the studies commissioned by the University of Chicago or by individuals such as Paul S. Taylor or George T. Edson. Nevertheless, the first four decades of the twentieth century saw a steady increase in the number of Mexicans in the Northwest. The need for food production during World War I, immigration restrictions on Europeans and Asians, and the Mexican Revolution all contributed to the movement of Mexicans away from the U.S.-Mexico borderlands and into areas such as the Pacific Northwest and Midwest. The 1930 census (see below) provides an indication of the small Mexican population in the Pacific Northwest. However, the transitory nature of the Mexican population during this era as Mexican migrants traveled from region to region seeking employment, especially in agriculture, made it easy for them to be overlooked by census enumerators.

Another important contrast to the Midwest is that the Mexican community developed at a slower pace in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, which can be attributed to the gradual development of permanent labor-intensive agriculture in the Northwest. The expansion of reclamation projects during the early- to mid-twentieth century—especially in North Central Washington’s Columbia Basin, the Puyallup and Skagit Valleys in Western Washington, the Willamette and Hood River Valleys in Oregon, and Snake River Valley in Idaho—brought water to these semi-desert regions. The result of these efforts not only meant increased acreage for agriculture, but a need for laborers. For example, the Mexican population in Washington in 1930 was approximately 562 individuals, in Oregon, 1,568, and in Idaho, 1,278.¹⁶ This population would not grow in any significant manner until after World War II, coinciding with the completion of major government-funded projects that siphoned water from the Columbia and Snake Rivers.

In contrast, and during the same period, Michigan had a Mexican population of 13,336, Iowa, 4,295, Kansas, 19,150, and Minnesota, 13,336.¹⁷ These selected Midwest states provided greater economic opportunities where agriculture was better established, as in Minnesota and Iowa, which attracted thousands of Mexican laborers to the sugar beet industry. In the Midwest, Mexicans were not only recruited for agriculture, but also to the railroad industry in Iowa and Kansas, and the factory floors of the automobile industry in Michigan, which provided long-term permanent employment.¹⁸ The post-World War II era brought employment opportunities in the Pacific Northwest, which in turn stimulated population growth in the region.

The 1940s introduced a shift in the presence of Mexicans throughout the United States. The outbreak of World War II, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the need for the United States to control the flow of labor from Mexico led to the creation of the Mexican farm and railroad labor programs popularly known as the Bracero Program. This was an emergency labor mechanism utilized by the U.S. government, in agreement with the Mexican government, that brought tens of thousands of Mexican laborers to the area. In fact, from 1943 to 1947 nearly fifty thousand braceros entered the Pacific Northwest as emergency labor, second only to California during the same period.¹⁹ Like braceros in other areas, many of these workers broke their contracts and did not return to Mexico. Others went to Mexico, then re-entered the United States and returned to their places of employment without contracts, before gaining employment visas and becoming permanent residents.²⁰ Historian Erasmo Gamboa wrote that the Chicano community in the Pacific Northwest had its genesis in the Bracero program…and the program was a watershed moment for Chicano communities in the Northwest.²¹ Gamboa, in one early exposé on the Chicanx community in the Northwest, made a critical observation:

Chicano Culture in the Pacific Northwest is truly distinct because of certain historical and regional factors. Principal among these factors are the migration patterns of Chicanos and Mexicans…Moreover, [in the 1940s] most of the migrants to Washington came from Texas…As people migrated to Washington state they brought this culture relatively unchanged…Once in the Northwest both the geographical distance and isolation from the Southwest and the alienation from the local Anglo culture guaranteed that the cultural matrix of the communities would remain in a near state of encapsulation and consequently unvaried.²²

For Midwest Mexican communities the decades leading up to World War II provided opportunities, but also economic hardships. When Mexicans became exempt from the provisions of the 1917 Immigration Act, the formal recruitment of Mexican workers for the sugar beet fields of the Midwest commenced and by the end of the decade thousands had been recruited.²³ Indeed, according to historian Dennis (Dionicio) Valdés, the recruitment for Mexican labor increased through the 1920s and by 1927 over 15,000 Mexicans were working in the beet fields in the Midwest.²⁴ These migrants were vulnerable to economic contraction in the sugar beet industry, and the automobile industry, the other major employer of Mexicans in the Midwest, which faced a crisis as the Great Depression intensified in the early 1930s and continued throughout the decade.

Mexicans in the Midwest experienced two different periods of economic hardship. The first began in the early 1920s when a national depression impacted the agriculture and automobile industries. The late 1920s depression slowed further movement of Mexicans into the Midwest and many became scapegoats for the economic ills of this period.²⁵ With the onset of the Great Depression during the 1930s the Mexican population working in the automobile industry were the first to be fired in favor of American citizens, and the thousands who had migrated north for the agriculture season found themselves without employment or struggling to survive on depressed wages. As the bottom fell out of the economy Mexicans previously employed in such places as Detroit found it difficult to find relief from the city or U.S. government because of rampant discrimination.²⁶ As the depression became entrenched and prolonged many cities throughout the United States began to implement repatriation or the mass deportation of people of Mexican ancestry. Formal efforts to deport Mexicans commenced in states such as Indiana, Illinois, and Minnesota.²⁷ The city of Detroit implemented a program for the removal of Mexican and Mexican Americans with the help of the U.S. and Mexican governments.

In the Pacific Northwest, Mexicans also faced deportation as a result of the economic depression. At McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary, located in Steilacoom, Washington, ninety Mexican inmates in 1932 were deported to Mexico to save costs for the institution.²⁸ Scholars Francisco E. Balderrama and Raymond Rodríguez also report in their path-breaking study, Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s, that Mexicans repatriated to the U.S.-Mexican border included families from Washington, Idaho, and Montana who complained of maltreatment and hardship encountered during repatriation.²⁹

With U.S. involvement in World War II, the Great Depression began to subside in the late 1930s and in the 1940s the Midwest again began to import bracero labor. A total of 28,156 braceros were utilized in the Midwest during the war period, whereas over 50,000 were used in the Pacific Northwest. The smaller number of braceros in the Midwest is attributed to a larger domestic Chicanx labor force. The use of braceros in the Midwest increased after the war period until the program’s demise in the 1960s, which is in contrast to the Pacific Northwest, where the Bracero Program, by and large, ended in the late 1940s.³⁰

The post-World War II period brought significant change to the Mexican population in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest. In the late 1960s Michigan had one of the largest migrant labor populations in the country, and the Midwest overall employed over 200,000 migrants in agriculture. Table 1 shows the significant increase of the Mexican population in selected Midwestern states from the 1930s to the second half of the twentieth century. And, although agriculture played an important role bringing Mexicans to the region, the majority of the Mexican population lived in urban zones such as Detroit, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Chicago.³¹ Nevertheless, the increase in the Hispanic population in the United States commenced with the economic restructuring that began in the 1970s.

Although the origins of the Chicanx community in the Pacific Northwest are found prior to World War II, the region witnessed a significant increase in its Mexican population during and following the war period. In 1947 the U.S. government ended its subsidy for transporting bracero workers from Mexico to their U.S. destinations. For Northwest growers, transporting Mexican labor from the U.S.-Mexico border to the Pacific Northwest became cost prohibitive. Subsequently, growers and labor contractors began to heavily recruit domestic labor from the state of Texas (resulting in the Tejano diaspora). Although Mexican Americans resided in the Northwest long before the 1940s, the population remained relatively stagnant for reasons already discussed. The post-World II movement of Tejano labor began a decades-long migration to the Northwest that became the foundation for many communities throughout the region.

Table 1

Mexican Population in the Midwest

Source: U.S. Bureau of Census, Census of Population, 1850-1970, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC. See Gilbert Cárdenas, Los Desarraigados: Chicanos in the Midwestern Region of the United States, Aztlan: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research 7 (Thematic Issue—Chicanos in the Midwest, Gilbert Cárdenas, Special Issue Editor) no. 2 (Summer 1976): 153-186.

In general, the permanent movement and settlement of Mexican labor to the Pacific Northwest can be divided into four periods. From 1900 through the 1930s the initial movement of ethnic Mexicans to the region consisted of small numbers of permanent and itinerant residents who worked in the sugar beet and fishing industries. The 1940s witnessed the recruitment of Braceros and Mexican American labor to the Northwest, with many becoming permanent fixtures in region. During the 1950s through the1980s, hundreds of thousands of migrants moved to the Northwest from the state of Texas in what became known as the Tejano diaspora. In fact, one study indicates that in 1957, Oregon was the recipient of the sixth largest movement of Tejanos in the country.³² From 1970 to 1980 the Spanish-speaking populations of Oregon and Idaho doubled, with Washington not far behind.³³ The decades of the 1980s through the 2000s represent a shift from domestic migration to international immigration, primarily from Mexico, but also significant numbers from Central America.

In 1970 there were 760,000 Mexican-born residents in the United States and by the year 2000 that number had increased to 8.8 million.³⁴ Countless studies have examined the dramatic increase of the U.S. Mexican population since the 1970s. Most of these studies point to economic restructuring, which saw the U.S. economy shift from heavy industry and manufacturing to service, manual labor, and labor-intensive manufacturing industries that drew heavily on immigrant labor.³⁵ The economic crises that shook Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s also contributed to this immigration. It should also be noted the transnational nature of the movement of Mexicans to the United States became more pronounced when coupled with the embeddedness of immigrant labor into the country’s economic structure. By the beginning of the twenty-first century the migration of Mexicans beyond the U.S.-Mexico border region included the movement both to rural agricultural zones and to urban centers. For example, Seattle, between 1990 and 2000, saw a 105 percent increase in its Mexican population and Portland, Oregon, witnessed a 175 percent surge during the same period.³⁶ The movement of Mexicans to the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries represents one of the longest sustained movements of human migration in history. Table 2 is a representation of that movement to the Pacific Northwest.

SCHOLARSHIP ON THE REGIONS

To better understand the history of the Chicanx presence in the Pacific Northwest and Midwest, we provide a brief overview of some of the studies from these regions. Grounding our book within the well-established scholarship of these two areas highlights and better situates this collection. We also believe it is important to illuminate the research and scholarship advanced by pioneering scholars of twentieth and early twenty-first century that reinforce the Chicanx presence in these regions and the scholarship produced on these communities.

Table 2

Hispanic Population in the Pacific Northwest

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Quick Facts, Oregon; Washington State, Office of Financial Management: Data Center; U.S. Census Bureau, Quick Facts, Idaho; Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, U.S. Census Bureau, Population Division, Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for the United States Regions, Divisions, and States; U.S. Census, Table 99 1980; U.S. Census, Table 135 1990.

Forty years ago Gilberto Cárdenas echoed similar sentiments in a special thematic issue of Aztlán: International Journal of Chicano Studies Research:

The Southwest regional approach has also failed to incorporate an adequate perspective toward the Chicano experience outside (north) of its boundaries. Thus, apart from the numerous problems associated with the study of the Chicano and Chicano Studies in the Southwest, the regional approach as a conceptual category has become a major limitation. The historical presence of Chicanos outside the Southwest suggests that the scope of Chicano Studies must be expanded to include a national perspective.³⁷

In his article in the same issue of Aztlán, Los Desarraigados: Chicanos in the Midwestern Region of the United States, Cárdenas provided a scathing critique of the early approach of Chicano studies and its lack of inclusion. Cárdenas was especially concerned with research and policy position papers on the Mexican origin community in the United States that only provided figures for California and the Southwest, rendering other regions with substantial Mexican enclaves invisible.³⁸

In the decades since Gilberto Cárdenas wrote those words, scholarship on the Midwest and Pacific Northwest has expanded dramatically, but an inclusive national perspective of Chicanx studies remains elusive. Research on both communities has grown since el grito de Cárdenas in Aztlán’s special issues on the Midwest, and we believe it is imperative to demonstrate the early twentieth century scholarship and its continuity into the twenty-first century. Scholars such as Dionicio N. Valdés, Zaragosa Vargas, Louise Año Nuevo-Kerr, and others initiated the pioneering work, along with the earlier studies by the University of Chicago organized in the 1920s that provided our first understanding of the Mexican presence in the Midwest.³⁹

For example, the groundbreaking work, The Mexicans in Chicago (1931), by Robert C. Jones and Louise R. Wilson, gave one of the first detailed accounts of the Mexican experience in the Midwest.⁴⁰ Others such as Paul S. Taylor, George T. Edson, and Manuel Gamio originated research on Mexicans in the Midwest during this period as well. Taylor also provided field notes and research on the recruitment of Mexican railroad section gangs to the Pacific Northwest and the movement of California’s Mexican migrant workers to Idaho, Oregon, and Washington.⁴¹ In fact, scholars doing historical research on Mexicans in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest often refer to these early pioneering scholars.

Paul S. Taylor’s papers are located at the University of California, Berkeley, Bancroft Library and primarily consist of research in the field of agriculture including studies on Mexicans in the United States, migrant workers, and the farm worker strikes of the 1930s and 1960s. Also in this collection are field reports conducted by George T. Edson on sugar beet workers in the north and north central states of Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin from 1926 to 1927.⁴² Taylor and Edson’s extensive research and vast field reports on the Mexican presence in the Midwest and beyond remain as relevant today as they were nearly a century ago.⁴³

Anthropologist and sociologist Dr. Manuel Gamio did widespread research on Mexican immigration and labor in both Mexico and the United States. Important to our understanding of the Mexican experience in the Midwest are Gamio’s publications Mexican Immigration to the United States: A Study of Human Migration and Adjustment (1930), The Life Story of the Mexican Immigrant (1931), and El inmigrante mexicano: La historia de su vida (1969). Each of these publications contains interviews with Mexican immigrants who came to the United States in the early years of the twentieth century.⁴⁴ A significant number of immigrants interviewed indicated they were recruited in Mexico and contracted to work in the railroad and automobile industries in such places as Nebraska, Kansas, Montana, and Michigan.⁴⁵

Norman D. Humphrey and John Thaden conducted research on Mexican communities in Michigan during the 1930s and 1940s.⁴⁶ The second half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of sociologist Julian Samora conducting research on Chicanxs in Chicago.⁴⁷ Samora eventually trained a cadre of Chicanx scholars who continued research on Mexicans in the Midwest. Although not a complete list of early scholarship on the Midwest, the above-mentioned individuals and their work provide a solid indication of the presence of the Mexican communities in the Midwest during the early twentieth century.

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the continuation of scholarship on the Mexican diaspora throughout the Great Lakes region and the appearance of research on Chicanxs in the Pacific